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Sino-Japanese Linguistic Influence
After humanity broke free of the confines of its homeworld, Earth's dominant languages, among them Chinese and Japanese, began asserting their influence over their colonies' culture, spoken and written linguistic system. Overview The creators of world made a decision to include influences from many major cultures of Earth history. The world's traditional languages are demonstrated to have grown beyond the bounds of their traditional home. This is true in the larger scope of cultures as it is true with specific Asian cultures like China and Japan. This treatment is especially unique to these Asian cultures but included are a variety of specific examples for curious readers.This page was initially created by via the explicit initiative of contributor Nemo2012 to feed his voracious and commendable curiosity. Variants Books The Belter language established in the books is a simple mix of words from the donor languages. The authors did not apply much rigor to the development of grammar or vocabulary. TV Adaptation The Belter language developed for the TV adaptation is entirely different from that found in the books. A professional linguist was contracted to develop the television version. This incarnation of Belter language is more fully and rigorously developed. Furthermore, this language is evolving and growing more expeditiously within the scope of the television production. The creators and intellectual property rights holders encourage scholars and fans to focus emphasis on this incarnation for serious discussion. Analysis These page will attempt where possible to address both major incarnations of Belter, denoting which context as needed. Despite it being less rigorous, since the book version is more firmly established and readily accessible, much of the discussion will cover that incarnation initially. More coverage of the TV incarnation will follow Speech The belter language used in the books includes among them words taken from Chinese. A noted example is the use of the word "Dui", a pinyin romanization of the word (对) used for an affirmative response like the word "yes".dui - (对) - borrowed from Mandarin. "yes", "correct", "agreed", "true" Chapter 6 Chapter 9, 17 Chapter 17, 26, 31, 41, 42, 44 Another example, "xie xie" (谢谢) for "thank you".xie xie - (谢谢) - "thank you" chapter 7 These words are routinely intermixed with Spanish, French and German Writing There are routine insertions of Chinese script characters alongside the English counterparts, especially on Martian iconography. Some may inquire whether this writing is used as a phonetic substitute without ideographic correlation. Without exhaustive investigation, it is the assertion of this wiki contributor that they are most probably ideographic representations of the accompanying text. Names Persons and vessels routinely carry names with Chinese and Japanese cultural background. Bear in mind that the book contains the "pinyin" words for these names. Some names are homonyms and might have different meanings dependent on the original untransliterated word. |-|Vessels = |-|People = Notes * Traditional Chinese writing uses characters that are ideographic/iconographic and express ideas more than they express sounds * When Chinese is written in one of its transliterated or "pinyin" forms, it is phonetic. That is, it borrows Latin characters to spell out sounds. there are some major compromises to this approach. * there are alternative phonetic systems, languages-specific symbolic forms, as well that represent phonemes/sonemes (language-specfic sounds) more precisely/accurately than the pinyin romanization systems. Scholars have devised a number of these character-based phonetic systems. They've even been converted into electronic input methods for computing with text in Chinese Media Please note the Chinese captioning alongside the ship name Shandian, and the lower rocker of Captain Sutton's combat patch. File:MCRN_Destroyer_Shandian_shadowing_Arboghast.jpg File:Sutton-001.png External Links * Wikipedia - Written Chinese